On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 11:27 AM, robertlazarski <robertlazarski@gmail.com> wrote:

I guess I didn't clearly indicate that I am not talking about recording at all.

Put a Nord stage in the same room as a Steinway - as I have seen first hand - and the difference is huge. I seen Keith Emersons Moog Modular live and felt it in the balcony.

Record the same Nord and Steinway and the difference is largely lost. If you record that modular and compare it the Moog plugin you won't really know what the big deal about the Modular is. A live performance of a good horn section like Chicago is largely lost in the recordings.

Analog synths cannot be sampled for all possibilities, which is why CV controlled analog synth and effect modulation separate its digital counterparts in sound sculpting.

Well, now the discussion is somewhat different.

An acoustic instrument interacts with the space you hear it in in ways that no stereo playback with common point sources is ever going to capture. It isn't easy to capture it even using ambisonics. Even if you did an analog recording and played it back via a very good speaker system in the same space, there will be things missing unless you do some really unusual things with the recording and playback systems.

An electrical instrument, whether analog like the Moog Model D or digital like Pianoteq can't do this: it never generates ANY sound at all except via some amplified speaker system. So it is entirely reasonable to think that you will always hear the same thing when you play a recording (analog or digital) of the instrument over the same playback system that you first heard it on. There is absolutely no difference ... electrical signal encounters speakers, is transformed into a pressure wave, reaches your ears. Recording or original sound ... no difference.

The inability to "sample for all possibilities" certainly has an impact, but it isn't relevant to physically modelled synthesizers, and it also has more impact on performance possibilities than actual acoustic tone.